The Bully in the Asylum: Is the G.O.P. Headed for its Cliff?

On Thursday, Senator Harry Reid came to the floor of the Senate to condemn a “dictatorship“—a petty sort of tyranny, one in the chamber down the hall, led by John Boehner, which Reid blamed for the lack of a deal to prevent the country from going over the fiscal cliff. “It’s being operated with a dictatorship of the speaker, not allowing the vast majority of the House of Representatives to get what they want,” Reid said.

Dictator is, in some ways, a funny label for a man who was last seen on Capitol Hill walking away from an embarrassment—his defeat, before Christmas, by his own caucus in what was mostly a symbolic vote about raising taxes on incomes above a million dollars. (John Cassidy has more on that debacle.) After Boehner, Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Mitch McConnell met with Obama Friday afternoon, the question, despite the President being “modestly optimistic,” was whether the Speaker could deliver anything he promised. (There was “not a lot of hilarity” at the meeting, Reid said.) If Reid was overstating anything, though, it was not Boehner’s status but the coherence—political, philosophical, organizational—of what we have been calling the Republican Party. If the measure of influence is the ability not to exert one’s will but to showily facilitate disorder, then the Speaker still has his dominion. He can do a lot of damage. But at this point, with this Congress, his power is less that of a ringmaster than of a bully in a madhouse.

Here is what passes for logic and optimism in Washington: the current theory is that Republicans will be more willing to strike a deal after we go off the cliff, because one of the big elements of the plummet is an increase in taxes for everyone. At that point, the thinking goes, they wouldn’t technically be agreeing to a tax increase on the top two per cent of earners—Obama’s offer—but rather lowering them for the rest. Never mind that all sorts of other things happen at midnight on December 31st—tax-related things, like reductions in the earned-income tax credit, as well as the automatic spending cuts that come with sequestration and miscellaneous items like an end to many unemployment benefits, disorder in the financial markets, and maybe, as a special bonus, a credit downgrade. We’re all expected to go over the cliff so that the Republicans can play a mind game.

But that is the Republican Party that we are dealing with—one more taken up by its internal divisions than by the business of the country. Nate Silver, in the Times, has a depressing look at the disappearance of the swing district, and the rise of ones that are steadily Republican or Democratic. What is crucial, as Silver points out, is that this doesn’t translate into safe seats for incumbents; it just turns the primaries into death matches. On the Republican side, in particular, these are increasingly governed by ideological tests.

There was some notion, by the time the G.O.P. convention came around, that the the Republican primaries, with their cast of odd fringe characters, were a strange, passing dream—a tangent that resolved in the nullity of Mitt Romney. Romney, though, is the one who has vanished (is anyone looking to him for leadership on the cliff?) while the primaries—their doctrinal priorities, their excesses—are what remain of the Republican Party. The G.O.P. is changing: the question, which the cliff debate may help answer, is whether what it is undergoing is a metamorphosis or a fracturing.

What Reid was referring to when he talked about the will of most of the house being ignored was an unofficial rule known as “the majority of the majority.” This means that Boehner will not allow anything to come to the floor that does not have the support of a majority of Republicans—even if it might pass with, say, forty-nine per cent of Republicans and a few Democrats thrown in. But there isn’t a rational Republican majority on the cliff questions, and maybe there’s no majority of any sort, except one that can exercise the dictatorship of No. For example, Boehner has claimed, in the past few days, that the House passed bills months ago that would forestall the crisis. One of them just extends tax cuts. The other revises sequestration so that the cuts all come from domestic programs. Neither is serious.

“It’s all theatrics now,” John Cornyn, the Texas Republican, said. One can take that as reassuring; there are some talks going on (word of which was spread Thursday via a lame-duck Senator’s Facebook page, so perhaps some of the players are just acting like crazy people). Another cynical-optimistic view is that Wall Street will discipline the G.O.P. and make it get serious about all this. (Is that what passes for idealism?) It’s worth remembering that the cliff is an entirely artificial construct—something set up to be so bad that even Congress would feel compelled to get it together to prevent it. They do still have a couple of days. Maybe it’s enough time for a group-therapy session.

Maybe it would be better if the Republicans knew what they wanted. Then the House of Representatives might at least be at work three days before our country goes off of the fiscal cliff. As it is, they have been told to come back Sunday—December 30th—when the countdown’s unit of measurement will have switched to hours (there are already fewer than a hundred left). And one might, again, have a better sense that Boehner could actually close a deal. It might be worse if they actually did know what they wanted and could get it, given that the extreme, rather than the merely highly conservative, part of the G.O.P. is the one on the move. In a straight-out fight, though, with Social Security, Medicare, the domestic programs that sustain families on one side and the marginal wealth of multi-millionaires on the other, who do the Republicans would think would win?

Photograph by Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty.

Amy Davidson Sorkin, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is a regular contributor to Comment for the magazine and writes a Web column in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.